Paris discovers its playboy President

For years the French expected their politicians to be discreet, keeping their public and private lives separate. But Nicolas Sarkozy has changed all that, courting the paparazzi and flaunting his girlfriends. But will the country warm to a celebrity leader, asks Elizabeth Day

Aurelie expects a certain sort of gravitas from her politicians. She likes to see them in sober suits, doing grown-up things such as signing treaties with a firm, statesman-like grip on a Mont Blanc fountain pen. So when the French President was pictured last week gazing like a lovesick teenager at his new supermodel girlfriend at the Disneyland Paris theme park, Aurelie couldn't help but feel it was a little undignified.

'He doesn't look like a politician,' she says dismissively, flicking through the pages of the latest Paris Match in a dingy cafe off the Boulevard Haussmann during her lunch break.

Inside the glossy magazine, there is a breathless 20-page photographic essay of President Nicolas Sarkozy, depicted in varying degrees of informality. Here he is, on page 34, in his shirt sleeves, lighting an enormous cigar and surrounded by the gilded rococo curlicues of the presidential palace.

On page 37, we are treated to an intimate glimpse of his bedroom, all crisp white linen and bedside bottles of Evian. Even Sarkozy's pet chihuahua, the ironically named Big, has had his diminutive canine charms immortalised on celluloid. The triumphant climax is a double-page photo spread of the twice-married, 52-year-old President with his new girlfriend, the model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, pictured among the jostling pre-Christmas crowds at Disneyland. 'He's acting more like a celebrity than a President,' says Aurelie, a 32-year-old shop assistant, as she stirs her herbal tisane.

She is by no means the only French voter who has expressed unease over recent weeks that the Sarkozy media circus has become rather too ostentatious for its own good. Since his election in May with 53 per cent of the vote, the right-wing Sarkozy has courted the media and created his own popularised version of presidential celebrity. Whereas his predecessors had long cultivated an aura of distanced rumination and a dispassionate sense of political reserve, Sarkozy appears to revel in his anointment in the nation's press as 'President Bling Bling'. For the first time in as long as anyone can remember, the va-va voom has been brought back into French politics.

'For Sarkozy, his private life and his public life are in the same bag and he likes to use both to manipulate coverage for himself, as a means of communicating with the electorate,' says Antoine Michelland, a chief reporter on Point de Vue magazine, which broke the story of the President's unlikely romantic liaison with Bruni.

Michelland points out that the timing of the picture was particularly convenient, coming as it did at the end of a week in which Sarkozy had been pilloried by press and politicians for his warm welcome of the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, and faced further battles with the trade unions over his far-reaching reform programme.

Last Saturday's photocall was a staged event: 15 photographers from various publications had been tipped off in advance, following weeks of rumour that the couple were seeing each other after a chance meeting at a dinner party arranged by an advertising executive, Jacques Seguela.

'I think we're catching up with the UK in the way that we now treat our politicians more as personalities, but that has in large part come from Sarkozy himself,' Michelland says. 'He has courted the attention because it makes him more accessible to the voters. It's a break with tradition because previous Presidents have deliberately been quite removed.'

It is true that it would be difficult to imagine the former President and military leader Charles de Gaulle gamely parading his love for a can-can girl in front of a roller-coaster or to envisage Jacques Chirac coyly admitting that he listens to Elvis on his iPod, as Sarkozy did on a sojourn to America over the summer. With his cigars, his pet chihuahua, his celebrity friends and his holidays taken on multi-million-pound yachts, Sarkozy seems to be rapidly evolving into the P Diddy of the political world.

Even his decision to go jogging in full view of the paparazzi - no other French President had ever before exercised in public - displayed a distinct lack of stuffiness. Undaunted by the prospect of root-and-branch reform, this is a President who wants to revolutionise France's old regime: to relax the 35-hour working week, to dispense with outdated pension perks for public-sector workers and to introduce boot camps for recalcitrant youngsters.

For many, Sarkozy's defiance of the rules is refreshing in a country still governed by a rigid social structure and an unspoken adherence to class etiquette. In a nation that prides rarefied intellect and venerates philosophers, Sarkozy portrays himself as a bruiser, a scrapper, a contender. One photographer recently commissioned to take his portrait for an American newspaper recalls that he spent the entire interview tilting his chair back on two legs, like a bored teenager. 'There was a sort of vulgarity to him and you felt he enjoyed it. He had a large plate of sliced saucisson in front of him that he ate all through the interview without offering it to anyone else.'

For all his gumption and glitz, Sarkozy's dramatic transformation of presidential office has been met in some quarters by a snobbish disapprobation of 'la peopolisation' of French politics. TF1, one of the country's main television channels, has taken the decision not to report Sarkozy's new relationship, stating rather high-mindedly that 'private life is sacred'.

France has a tradition of muted reverence for its political leaders, aided in part by the notoriously strict privacy laws that ensure any incursion into their private lives remains a matter of agonised deliberation. Former Socialist President Francois Mitterrand kept his mistress for two decades at the public expense, but the press drew a discreet veil over his peccadilloes until his illegitimate daughter turned up at her father's funeral in 1996.

By contrast, the French public were able to pore over details of Sarkozy's divorce from his former wife, Cecilia, when it was made public two months ago amid rumours of her infidelity. Cecilia is now in London, where her 10-year-old son, Louis, has promptly managed to shoot to the top of the waiting list of the oversubscribed French Lycee.

But some are still uneasy with Sarkozy's ready accessibility, preferring instead that their leaders display a certain hauteur. When Le Figaro newspaper, renowned for its conservative outlook and sober analysis, published a front-page colour photograph of Bruni last Monday, the move provoked uproar among the paper's own reporters. In fact, the decision had come not from the editor of the paper, but from its publisher, Etienne Mougeotte, a close friend of Sarkozy.

Vivienne Walt, the Paris correspondent of Time magazine, says that there has been 'a fundamental change' in the French media, brought about largely by Sarkozy himself.

'Most newspapers are doing exceedingly badly and are under pressure to be a lot more feisty, a lot more critical and to compete with glossy magazines on the newsstands,' she says. 'At the same time, Sarkozy is very close to a lot of media barons and he has managed to create for himself a sort of phenomenon. He has almost become an icon, a complete media animal.

'French society is very divided over what it thinks about this. Some are very cynical and see it as a media ploy. A President is the closest thing they have to a king and Sarkozy is criticised by lots of people for not being presidential enough, not mysterious enough, too on show, too much like an average politician.

'But there are others who like the fact that Sarkozy has once again made France part of a global conversation. It's been such a transformation. In the last years of the Chirac presidency, there was a feeling that France was a country snoozing through history. Sarkozy is the first person who has come along in a generation that offers France a taste of what it is to be an "It country". He's so unlike the patrician Chirac: he's from immigrant stock, he's part-Jewish and he doesn't look at all like a man from the French upper classes. I think the best thing you can say about Sarkozy is that nobody's neutral.'

Whatever people might think of him, there is little doubt that Sarkozy is being talked about. Part of this may be generated by class condescension: Sarkozy's father was an immigrant who fled Hungary in 1945, but much of it also comes from a genuine admiration for his heady mixture of dynamism and glamour, injected like a shot in the arm of an ailing political system.

Christmas shoppers in Paris, their shoulders braced against the bitter December wind, talk of little else. They have become, in the words of one media commentator, 'sarkofascine'.

In a small newspaper shop, huddled into a draughty corner in the subway leading to the Opera metro station, the proprietor has sold out of the latest edition of Point de Vue, featuring a fetching cover shot of Bruni, waving regally from the lowered window of a limousine.

In the Galeries Lafayette, Paris's historic department store, a male assistant nods approvingly at a customer's choice of designer shirt, commenting that it is 'tres Sarko'. You can buy 'I love Sarko' underpants in French boutiques.

And on the Facebook social networking site, there are already several groups devoted to a slavish following of an unlikely political hero. The group 'My President is better than yours, he hooked up with Carla Bruni' has more than 600 members.

Certainly, it would take a leap of considerable creative powers to imagine any of our home-grown politicians exuding such effortless razzle-dazzle. Even if he were single, the notion of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, dating a supermodel is about as far-fetched as the European Union insisting that all croissants must henceforth be baked straight. Soon, we will have the chance to examine the two leaders together in close quarters. Sarkozy confirmed last week that he would be coming on a state visit to Britain in March, possibly with Bruni.

Bruni, who celebrates her 40th birthday today, is a particularly impressive presidential escort - both four inches taller than her beau and 13 years younger (Sarkozy is 53 in January). A former supermodel and heiress to an Italian tyre-manufacturing fortune, she released an album of self-penned folksongs in 2003 and sold more than two million copies. Her previous boyfriends include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and the philosopher Raphael Enthoven, with whom she has a six-year-old son. In a country where virility is prized almost as much as a perfectly ripe Camembert, Sarkozy's ability to seduce such an alpha female has lent him a certain frisson.

Vivienne Walt talks of the Bruni-Sarkozy alliance in the same breath as John F Kennedy's affair with Marilyn Monroe, plotted along the same corresponding axes of power and glamour. It is not an idle comparison. In many ways, Sarkozy's first year of presidency echoes that of his American forerunner: a fresh broom sweeping away the dusty former regime, a charismatic world leader willing to be photographed behind normally closed doors and a modernising President gutsy enough to challenge outdated traditions.

Nicolas Domenach, who wrote a 2004 biography of Sarkozy and is editor of political weekly Marianne, puts it thus: 'Nicolas Sarkozy wants to show himself as a true man and not a poor cuckolded husband... to show that he can conquer the most beautiful women in the world,' he writes on the Marianne website. 'Power is a question of strength and Sarkozy could not stay on his own for long.'

Despite Sarkozy's small stature - he stands at barely 5ft 5in - and his well-publicised marital problems, he has always proved popular with the female electorate. A survey of more than 3,600 people in the immediate aftermath of the May election found that 52 per cent of women voters cast their ballot for Sarkozy, compared with 48 per cent for the female candidate, Segolene Royal, who proposed a raft of feminist legislation. It is perhaps Sarkozy's mixture of arrogance and toughness that proves so potent among French women, although Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is said to be irritated by his habit of hugging and kissing her on the cheek at every meeting.

'I think part of what is so appealing about him is that he is totally unapologetic about who he is and what he's trying to do,' says Andrew Nutter, 27, an entrepreneur with dual French-English nationality who divides his time between London and Paris. 'He's breaking down the old order in France. You used to have to go to a special school to get into politics and to be very careful not to tread on too many people's toes. Sarkozy wasn't born and bred into that world. He is a little Napoleon from Hungary and he's really trying to put through some difficult policies that I believe will change France for the better.

'He's got a lot of energy and I think the French have a sort of split relationship with him that shifts between a sense of admiration and a sense, almost, of jealousy.'

There is a sense, also, that the French patience for Sarkozy's media stunts is wearing thin. For all Sarkozy's charm, France remains a country scarred by high unemployment and trade union protests, by burnt-out cars and rioters on the streets. The President faces a series of serious political challenges in 2008, and all the glamorous brunettes in the world will be unable to divert the electorate's attention if his far-reaching reforms flounder.

But until the glossy patina wears off, there will doubtless continue to be a steady trade in 'I love Sarko' underpants. It could be the perfect Christmas gift for Carla.

All the president's women

Felix FaureFrance's President from 1895 to 1899 died while making love to his mistress at the Elysee Palace.

Charles de GaulleDe Gaulle distinguished himself by being the only post-Second World War French leader to remain faithful to his wife.

Valery Giscard D'estaing'When I was President of the Republic, I was in love with 17 million women. When I saw them in the crowd, they felt it and then they voted for me,' he said in a TV interview last year. He took Sylvia Kristel, star of soft-porn film Emmanuelle, on a number of his foreign trips.

Francois MitterandThe existence of his illegitimate daughter, Mazarine, was revealed to the world in Paris Match magazine a few months before he left office in 1994. Both his wife, Danielle, and his mistress, Anne Pingeot, attended his funeral two years later.

Jacques ChiracHis long-suffering wife, Bernadette, had to rely on his chauffeur to discover her husband's whereabouts. She had to share a state visit to Tunisia with Claudia Cardinale, an actress and a 'close friend' of the President. Luc Torres